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Our first application will be the Bot Colony (http://www.botcolony.com), an online adventure video game where the player converses with the characters to advance in the game. Bot Colony will also be played by people who are interested to improve their English in a fun way (especially English as a Second Language/ESL). Check out Bot Colony online for more information.

The language pipeline we're developing is generic, enabling computers to converse with people on a wide-range of day-to-day topics. We expect that our language understanding technology will find additional applications besides the game.

We have two openings in our Montreal facility for work on Word Sense Disambiguation and knowledge-acquisition and structuring for use in dialogue.

The following qualifications are mandatory: - Strong Java skills - SQL/ Object-oriented databases - Basic knowledge of English grammar (more in-depth knowledge of English syntax, semantics and pragmatics would of ocurse be great) - B.Sc. in Computer Scienece is a minimum requirement

Background in any Computational Linguistics sub-domain is highly desirable: we have work in parsing, disambiguation, co-reference resolution, Question Answering, Dialog management, ontologies, Corpus processing, knowledge-acquisition, and evolving large lexical databases.

Education-wise, a M.Sc. or Ph.D degree in Computational Linguistics is also desirable.

We stress, however, that Computational Linguistics background is not mandatory, and we will interview very strong Java programmers, with experience in databases and online applications. Even if you don't have the formal background, you should have an interest in language processing and the desire you to learn.

The working environment at North Side is relaxed and dynamic. You will be part of a growing, multi-disciplinary team working on language R&D, 3D graphics, gameplay programming (the game is scripted in natural language) and art.